As is often the case when things are complicated, extreme views have superficial appeal. On the one extreme, some see China as an inevitable enemy that must be contained; on the other hand, there are those who see China as a slowly developing democra...
When life beats us down, we often do not feel worthwhile to ourselves nor to anyone else. Often, we try to hide our feelings of inadequacy in pursuit of perfection, which develops into self-loathing. If only we can be perfect, then we can be okay.
I believe there no surer path to leaping dramatically forward in your career than to earn a Ph.D. in the humanities. Because the thought leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully, step by step, up the career ladder. The leaders are t...
There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffe...
I sort of was inspired by 'Friday Night Lights,' where it was a very different show, but similar in that they were both large ensemble dramas where you had many stories going on at once. I wanted to do a show that shared that element, and that's real...
Back in George W. Bush's second term, when diplomatic realism began to overtake foolish bellicosity, the president developed one of his patented nicknames for the two most powerful neoconservative journalists, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer:...
When you live the life of a comedian, it's such a state of arrested development. I can't deal with anything very maturely. I'm still really bad at paying bills or doing anything that would be considered semi-adult. I'm really bad at it. It's weird I ...
Why do you think so many actors are only half-developed people? It's very easy when you're a young actor to have these intense, explosive friendships for short periods of time, because you can control what's shown of you. Then you go on to your next ...
For a period of time, I carried cameras with me wherever I went, and then I realized that my interest in photography was turning toward the conceptual. So I wasn't carrying around cameras shooting stuff, I was developing concepts about what I wanted ...
There's a theory about fame: the moment it strikes, it arrests development. Michael Jackson remained suspended in childhood, enjoying sleepovers and funfairs; Winona Ryder, an errant teen who dabbled in shoplifting and experimented with pills; George...
The truth of why I used to listen to Arrested Development on my Walkman was because if I didn't, it would take me 20 minutes to walk to school. If I did, it took me 15. That's the reason I loved it. I just had more of a kick in my step, more of a bou...
It used to be that readers were relegated because they considered themselves far above society, and so the metaphor of the ivory tower developed. Now there's still this idea that the reader doesn't take part in the social game and in politics, the re...
Fantasy sports went a long way toward developing the sabermetrics formulas used not only by oddsmakers but general managers in hiring players. So the amateur fantasists ended up creating some of the algorithms that Oakland GM Billy Bean's statisticia...
I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn't want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. 'Discreet Music' was like that, and 'Music for Airports.' What you hear o...
I play piano and guitar and I do write my own stuff so to a certain extent I know what I want to do in regards to music. But I'm still finding out what kind of music is my favourite kind to listen to, never mind do myself so I've got a lot of time to...
A Christian school should be a place where young men and young women go through a period of spiritual formation and development so that they come out incredibly more proficient at living out their calling than they would have been had they not gone t...
I developed a prejudice in high school that it was all going to be boring. That kind of teenage, why-do-I-have-to-read-these-goddamn-classics feeling. And then you discover that the classics are classics because they're lively. They don't stick aroun...
However, James and Aamir did not discuss their astounding box office grosses or formulas for success.Instead, they exchanged notes on the process of film-making; how ideas, even seemingly crazy ones that require developing a unique camera, as James d...
I long ago developed a very practical smile, which I call my "Noh smile" because it resembles a Noh mask whose features are frozen. Its advantage is that men can interpret it however they want; you can imagine how often I've relied on it.
Look at Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union. All of...
We do not build new Jewish communities in Samaria, Judea and Gaza. The United States has never accepted our building of communities or of the fence. Yet, I've managed to develop relations between Israel and the United States even though President Bus...
